Mark McGranaghan

Smart grid interoperability is the means to achieve the twin green and digital transition but re-mains heterogeneous and fragmented to date. This work presents the first ideas and corner-stones of an Interoperability Roadmap for the Energy Transition that is being developed by the Horizon Europe int:net project. This roadmap builds on four cornerstones that address open interoperability issues. These are a knowledge base to address the lack of convergence among existing initiatives, a maturity model and a network of testing and certification facilities to ad-dress the lack of practical tools for the industry, and a governance process to address the gap between standards-related approaches of Standards Development Organisations and Research and Innovation projects. A community of practice will be set up to ensure the continuity of the ongoing activities related to smart grid interoperability. To outlive the duration of the int:net project, the aim is to formalise the community of practice as a legal entity.

THE GROWING PENETRATION OF renewable generation, both at the bulk system level and throughout the distribution system, is inevitable and accelerating. This imposes all kinds of demands on the planning and operation of the grid. Most importantly, we will have to make sure that there are resources to provide the flexibility needed by the grid with high renewable penetration: energy for periods of low renewable generation, ramping capability when generation levels are changing, frequency regulation, inertia, and so on. This is happening at the same time as we are electrifying more of the energy system, imposing additional burdens on the grid.

The ability of hunting and gathering populations to adopt herding forms of subsistence constitutes the crux of a long-standing debate in southern African archaeological and anthropological scholarship concerning the spread of livestock to the subcontinent. This article takes as a detailed case study the subsistence strategies of the nineteenth-century ǀXam Bushmen of the Northern Cape (South Africa), extracted from a transcription of the entirety of the Bleek–Lloyd Archive. It focuses on ǀXam characterization of and relationships with the various domesticated species that shared their Karoo landscape, and asks whether these relationships differ markedly from their conceptions of non-domesticated animals. Turning to the wider context of hunter-gatherer engagements with domesticates, the article concludes by proposing that, for the ǀXam, domesticated fauna were part of a spectrum of differentiated resources, and did not entail an interaction with a wholly alien suite of new demands.

This paper discusses new types of sensors and data management approaches that can be applied to operate and manage the grid more efficiently and flexibly while maintaining reliability. Sensors can help increase awareness of asset condition and grid conditions for more optimum management of the grid. Integration of sensors with system models to predict conditions on the grid can further improve the grid management potential. Examples of sensors that can contribute to smart grid goals include advanced meters, wireless voltage and current sensors, line post sensors, sensors integrated with IEDs, PMUs, etc. These devices must be integrated with data collection systems, data management systems, and system models to help achieve new functionality that benefits the overall efficiency, reliability, and flexibility of the grid.

Fault location is of considerable interest for utilities to improve their reliability and speed storm restorations. Power quality recorders, relays, and other monitors can provide information to help locate faults. In this paper, some basic impedance-based fault-location methods are evaluated on utility measurement data with known fault locations. The main finding is that reasonably accurate fault locations are possible on a wide range of distribution circuits with either feeder-level or bus-level substation monitoring. Another important finding described is how monitoring can be used to estimate the parameters of the fault arc. This can improve fault locations and help with accident investigations, equipment failure forensics, and other hazards related to the power and energy created by the arc